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Archive for January, 2014

General Eric Holder said Wednesday that just because states are legalizing marijuana for recreational purposes doesn’t mean minors will be able to roll up a joint.

“People cannot buy alcohol I guess now until you’re age… age 21, but young people find ways to get alcohol because adults can have access to it,” Holder said before the Senate Judiciary Committee. “I’m not sure that we will see the same thing here given what we have said with regard to our enforcement priorities.”

His comments came as Colorado and Washington state have been implementing new laws allowing recreational pot. Marijuana remains illegal under federal law, and under questioning, Holder defended the Obama administration’s stance in allowing the states to move forward with their laws while the feds work to make sure the drug doesn’t become available to minors or move across state lines.

“The distribution of marijuana to minors will… will entail a very vigorous federal response,” Holder said.

The Department of Justice is expected to unveil new guidelines that might help banks transact with legal marijuana companies, which are increasingly worried about the dangers of operating all-cash businesses.

Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions, a member of the committee, lamented President Barack Obama’s recent comments that marijuana isn’t more harmful than alcohol, saying he was “heartbroken” to hear Obama argue that states’ experiments in legalization should go forward. Sessions said the country had previously worked to“create a hostility to drug use” that shouldn’t recede.

“I think that the use of any drug is potentially harmful,” Holder said of Obama’s comments. “And included in that would be alcohol.”

Sessions was skeptical. “Well, Lady Gaga says she’s addicted to it and it’s not harmless,” he said.

Pot at the county fair? Why not? Colorado’s Denver County is adding cannabis-themed contests to its 2014 summer fair. It’s the first time pot plants will stand alongside tomato plants and homemade jam in competition for a blue ribbon.

There won’t actually be any marijuana at the fairgrounds. The judging will be done off-site, with photos showing the winning entries. And a live joint-rolling contest will be done with oregano, not pot.

But county fair organizers say the marijuana categories will add a fun twist on Denver’s already-quirky county fair, which includes a drag queen pageant and a contest for dioramas made with Peeps candies.

“We thought it was time for us to take that leap and represent one of the things Denver has going on,” said Tracy Weil, the fair’s marketing and creative director.

The nine marijuana categories include live plants and clones, plus contests for marijuana-infused brownies and savory foods. Homemade bongs, homemade roach clips and clothing and fabric made with hemp round out the categories.

Judges will look only at plant quality, not the potency or quality of the drugs they produce. Other contests – patterned after Amsterdam’s famed Cannabis Cup – already gauge drug quality and flavor.

Top prize is $20, plus of course a blue ribbon. The fair already has a green ribbon – awarded for using environmentally conscious methods.

The entries will be shown in a “Pot Pavilion” open only to people over 21. Alongside the pot entrants will be 24 categories of homemade beer, four categories for homemade wine and one category for “spirits and liqueurs.”

Prizes will also be given for speedy joint-rolling, though fair organizers insist there won’t be any marijuana consumption on-site. Competitors in the live Doritos-eating contest will have to acquire their munchies elsewhere.

Even the photographs of the winning plants will be viewable only by adults 21. …read more

A petition campaign to legalize medical marijuana in Florida has gathered enough signatures to put the issue on November’s general election ballot. Just after noon Friday, county elections officials had validated 710,508 signatures — enough to force a vote on a proposed constitutional amendment to allow growth, sale and possession of marijuana for medical uses.

The Florida Supreme Court could still reject the ballot language — and any vote along with it — but organizers expressed jubilation Friday that an expensive, last minute push at least fulfilled the signature requirements for citizen initiated amendments.

“I’ve spent $4 million, hired the best legal minds in the state of Florida, rallied my army of angels and collected more than 1.1 million signatures in five or six months,” said Orlando trial attorney John Morgan, who took over a small, grass roots petition campaign last year and gave it the clout to get on the ballot.

By law, constitutional amendment campaigns for 2014 require signatures from 683,149 registered voters. Morgan’s group, United for Care, added more than 50,000 signatures Friday to exceed that mark.

Morgan, who has paid about three-quarters of United for Care’s expenses, said the petition drive cost twice as much as he planned, largely because signatures lagged by December and the campaign had to gear up.

By paying professional collectors as much as $4 a signature, United for Care began dumping hundreds of thousands of petitions on beleaguered county elections officials. At the 1.1 million mark, the campaign shut down two weeks ago, then waited to see how many signatures actually came from registered voters.

The rejection rate ran about 30 per cent — typical for large petition campaigns. Still, the Florida Division of Elections reported 50,000 new signature validations on Friday, putting the total over the top.

The campaign also met its other requirement: hitting signature targets …read more

The head of the Drug Enforcement Administration slammed President Barack Obama this week for saying marijuana is no more harmful than alcohol, according to a report Saturday in the Boston Herald.

DEA Administrator Michele M. Leonhart reportedly told a group of sheriffs at a closed-door conference in Washington that she was frustrated by the administration’s recent openness toward state legalization. Although Leonhart’s remarks were not made publicly, her pointed references to the president could put her job in jeopardy.

“She was honest,” Mike H. Leidholt, president of the National Sheriffs’ Association, told the Herald. “She may get fired. But she was honest.”

The administration so far has shown itself willing to let Colorado’s and Washington’s experiments with marijuana legalization move ahead. But those baby steps toward respecting state legislation appear to have sown dissension at the DEA.

Leonhart, a former Baltimore cop and long-time DEA agent before ascending to the agency’s top role, staunchly opposes mainstreaming marijuana use. In 2012 House Judiciary testimony, she refused to answer a question from Colorado Rep. Jared Polis (D) about whether she thought crack or heroin were worse for a person’s health than marijuana. She said in December that legalization sends “mixed messages” to high-schoolers, and this month, one of her top deputies told Congress that legalization is “reckless and irresponsible.”

Leonhart also appears to have been upset by a flag made of hemp that flew over the U.S. Capitol on July 4 at the behest of Polis.

Bristol County, Mass., Sheriff Thomas M. Hodgson told the Herald that “she said her lowest point in 33 years in the DEA was when she learned they’d flown a hemp flag over the Capitol on July 4. The sheriffs were all shocked. This is the first time in 28 years I’ve ever heard anyone in her position be this candid.”

The office has increased the number of files it accepts and amount of money it makes, but there are growing concerns about its fairness and transparency

It was Oct. 15, 2007, when the RCMP officer knocked on David Lloydsmith’s door.

Mr. Lloydsmith, a former electrician on partial disability living in the Fraser Valley community of Mission, was told the officer was investigating a dropped 911 call. Mr. Lloydsmith lived alone and said he hadn’t touched the phone.

The officer asked to come in and search the residence, according to court documents. Mr. Lloydsmith declined several times and finally moved to close the door. The officer then forced his way in and put Mr. Lloydsmith in handcuffs. A second officer arrived within minutes and the Mounties began their search.

They eventually found marijuana plants in the basement. Mr. Lloydsmith was arrested, but released without charges. The initial officer wrote in a report that the offence was “minor” and, with the plants removed from the home, public interest had been met.

Mr. Lloydsmith thought the ordeal was over. But three years later, the province’s Civil Forfeiture Office moved to seize the residence. The legal battle continues, despite an earlier ruling that the evidence collected against him was in breach of the Charter. A judge described the search as “warrantless” and “unreasonable.”

Mr. Lloydsmith is one of the hundreds of British Columbians who have become caught in the relatively new spectre of civil forfeiture – a process originally intended to fight organized crime that has come to have a much wider reach.

A Globe and Mail investigation spanning several months and more than two dozen interviews has found the Civil Forfeiture Office has rapidly increased the number of files it accepts and the amount of money it brings in, while remaining largely out of the public eye. But as the …read more

U.S. treasury and law enforcement agencies will soon issue regulations opening banking services to state-sanctioned marijuana businesses even though cannabis remains classified an illegal narcotic under federal law, Attorney General Eric Holder said on Thursday.

Holder said the new rules would address problems faced by newly licensed recreational pot retailers in Colorado, and medical marijuana dispensaries in other states, in operating on a cash-only basis, without access to banking services or credit.

Proprietors of state-licensed marijuana distributors in Colorado and elsewhere have complained of having to purchase inventory, pay employees and conduct sales entirely in cash, requiring elaborate and expensive security measures and putting them at a high risk of robbery.

It also makes accounting for state sales tax-collection purposes difficult.

“You don’t want just huge amounts of cash in these places,” Holder told the audience at the University of Virginia. “They want to be able to use the banking system. And so we will be issuing some regulations I think very soon to deal with that issue.”

Holder’s comments echoed remarks by his deputy, James Cole, in September during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Capitol Hill.

Colorado this month became the first state to open retail outlets legally permitted to sell marijuana to adults for recreational purposes, in a system similar to what many states have long had in place for alcohol sales.

Washington state is slated to launch its own marijuana retail network later this year, and several other states, including California, Oregon and Alaska, are expected to consider legalizing recreational weed in 2014.

The number of states approving marijuana for medical purposes has also been growing. California was the first in 1996, and has since been followed by about 20 other states and the District of Columbia.

But the fledgling recreational pot markets in Colorado and Washington state have sent a new wave of cannabis …read more

In an interview with the New Yorker released on Sunday, President Obama made perhaps the strongest endorsement by any sitting president on relaxed marijuana laws. Pushed by interviewer David Remnick, Obama acknowledged that marijuana is less dangerous than alcohol in its effect on consumers. He also noted the obvious racial and economic disparities in enforcement of marijuana laws. “Middle-class kids don’t get locked up for smoking pot, and poor kids do,” he said. “And African-American kids and Latino kids are more likely to be poor and less likely to have the resources and the support to avoid unduly harsh penalties.”

A fully budded marijuana plant ready for trimming is seen at the Botanacare marijuana store ahead of their grand opening on New Year’s day in Northglenn, Colorado, in this December 31, 2013 file photo. The District of Columbia will take a step closer toward decriminalizing marijuana on January 15, 2014 with a move that will make smoking a joint in the U.S. capital a violation comparable to a parking ticket.

In fact, the president backhandedly came close to endorsing outright legalization of the drug for recreational purposes, by offering a modified endorsement of new laws in Colorado and Washington that do exactly that:

Accordingly, he said of the legalization of marijuana in Colorado and Washington that “it’s important for it to go forward because it’s important for society not to have a situation in which a large portion of people have at one time or another broken the law and only a select few get punished.”

Obama circled back around and noted the new laws in both states could be “a challenge” because of the potential for legalization of other, harder types of drugs. He also noted he has advised his daughters not to smoke marijuana. So it wasn’t an outright endorsement.

In his second-floor office above a hair salon in north Seattle, Ryan Kunkel is seated on a couch placing $1,000 bricks of cash — dozens of them — in a rumpled brown paper bag. When he finishes, he stashes the money in the trunk of his BMW and sets off on an adrenalized drive downtown, darting through traffic and nervously checking to see if anyone is following him.

Despite the air of criminality, there is nothing illicit in what Mr. Kunkel is doing. He co-owns five legal medical marijuana dispensaries, and on this day he is heading to the Washington State Department of Revenue to commit the ultimate in law-abiding acts: paying taxes. After about 25 minutes at the agency, Mr. Kunkel emerges with a receipt for $51,321.

“Carrying such large amounts of cash is a terrible risk that freaks me out a bit because there is the fear in my mind that the next car pulling up beside me could be the crew that hijacks us,” he said. “So, we have to play this never-ending shell game of different cars, different routes, different dates and different times.”

Legal marijuana merchants like Mr. Kunkel — mainly medical marijuana dispensaries but also, starting this year, shops that sell recreational marijuana in Colorado and Washington — are grappling with a pressing predicament: Their businesses are conducted almost entirely in cash because it is exceedingly difficult for them to open and maintain bank accounts, and thus accept credit cards.

The problem underscores the patchwork nature of federal and state laws that have evolved fitfully as states have legalized some form of marijuana commerce. Though 20 states and the District of Columbia allow either medical or recreational marijuana use — with more likely to follow suit — the drug remains illegal under federal law. The Controlled Substances …read more

Charges for all manner of marijuana crimes plummeted in the months after Colorado voters legalized limited possession of cannabis for people over 21.

According to a Denver Post analysis of data provided by the Colorado Judicial Branch, the number of cases filed in state court alleging at least one marijuana offense plunged 77 percent between 2012 and 2013. The decline is most notable for charges of petty marijuana possession, which dropped from an average of 714 per month during the first nine months of 2012 to 133 per month during the same period in 2013 — a decline of 81 percent.

That may have been expected — after all, people over 21 can now legally possess up to an ounce of marijuana. But The Post’s analysis shows state prosecutors also pursued far fewer cases for marijuana crimes that remain illegal in Colorado.

For instance, charges for possessing more than 12 ounces of marijuana dropped by 73 percent, and cases alleging possession with intent to distribute fewer than 5 pounds of marijuana dipped by 70 percent. Even charges for public consumption of marijuana fell statewide, by 17 percent, although Denver police have increased their number of citations issued for public consumption.

While marijuana prosecutions against people over 21 declined, so did prosecutions against people under 21, for whom all marijuana possession remains illegal except for medical marijuana patients.

Colorado Attorney General John Suthers said he thinks the drop in cases may be due to police not wanting to parse the complexities of the state’s marijuana law.

In a dramatic switch from recent decades, a clear majority of Americans say smoking marijuana on a recreational basis should be legal. In fact, a new CNN-ORC International poll indicates that the moral stigma attached with smoking the drug has plummeted, too, and now fewer find fault with the activity in terms of seeing it as a sign of subpar values.

Specifically: Fully 55 percent of survey respondents said marijuana should be legal. Only 44 percent said it should remain illegal.

CNN said Americans have been slowly but steadily embracing the idea of legalized marijuana for the last 25 years. In 1987, about 16 percent supported legalizing the drug. In 1996, that statistic was 26 percent; in 2002, it was 34 percent, and just a couple years ago, it was 43 percent.

But this is the first time a clear majority found sense in legalizing the drug.

Still, there are several key demographic differences, CNN said.

“There are big differences on age, region, party ID and gender, with senior citizens, Republicans and Southerners the only major demographic groups who still oppose the legal use of pot,” said CNN polling director Keating Holland.

For example: Two-thirds of those between the ages of 18 and 34 said pot should be legal. Only 64 percent between the ages of 34 and 49 felt similarly, CNN reported.

The findings show a major shift in American culture since the days of President Nixon, who declared drugs “public enemy Number One,” and 65 percent in the country agreed that marijuana use was a serious problem.

“Attitudes toward the effects of marijuana and whether it is morally wrong to smoke pot have changed dramatically over time,” Mr. Holland said. “That also means that marijuana use is just …read more

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